Up Shit’s Creek (a.k.a. Where's My Frickin' Paddle?)

It’s sort of like Dawson’s Creek, but a whole lot more shitty. No, it’s nothing like Dawson’s Creek, I’m just grasping at straws here (so I can breathe through the funky poo smell that’s surrounding this all-around shitty year that is 2013 thus far). And, yes, I do mean “shitty” in the literal sense. As in – I discover that my friend’s kid pooped in MY bed and soiled the sheets – shitty. And – GAR gets crapped on by a bird at a South Beach restaurant – shitty. Or, more recently – our septic tank backs up and fills our bathrooms with shit – shitty. So, yeah, that’s what I mean by “shitty.”

It hasn’t been pretty, and it sure as heck doesn’t smell like roses, but this is the crappy life we’re leading at the moment.

Unlike bird poop, which can be washed away and forgotten, or even our comforter, which can be washed but GAR insists on throwing out anyway because, ewww, you’re sleeping in what was once someone else’s poo (IKEA here we come!), our septic problem, while manageable, is a shitty issue that’s a little less easy to snap our fingers at and pray it will clear up. It takes professional help (not to mention a pretty penny out of our checkbook), which is on the way, but has left us knee-deep in shitty water in the meantime (or perhaps I exaggerate just a smidge, but it does bubble up through the drain in our shower which, thankfully, is the shower we don’t use, when we try to flush the toilet, making for a “which is the worse in these two scenarios?” type of debate every time we use the loo). The worst part is that, in the middle of all this, the seal on our toilet ring broke, which causes this murky brown sludge to seep out from underneath the toilet in our master bath as well (the whole area has been deemed a hazardous wasteland by yours truly and no one is allowed to enter).

Ah, the joys of owning a waste removal system built a quarter of a century ago.

On the plus side, the grass in our front lawn (located right where the septic tank is buried) has never looked greener! Who needs sprinklers when you have fresh manure fertilizing your grass (seriously, who ever thought that storing all your raw sewage in the ground in front of your own home was a good idea)? Of course I’m guessing that these lovely new green blades of grass won’t last long when the septic people come out tomorrow to dig it up all to drain the overfull container of shit below (seriously, that has to be the best job ever).

So we only have to suffer through one more shitty night before this whole ordeal is over. And I’m hoping that the remainder of 2013 is far less crappy. But I can only be so cautiously optimistic. While we did escape from the shitty confines of our home this past weekend for a lovely getaway to the Florida Keys with some friends, we didn’t exactly avoid all contact with bodily secretions. In fact, the mattress we were sleeping on (though, yes, it did have a sheet over it) was stained with something yellow that GAR repeatedly assured me was “spilled apple juice.” While I’m suspicious of his logical reasoning on that one I’m willing to go with it, for now, just because, even if it was what I thought it was, it was still a small step up from finding smelly brown child poo smudges across my pillowcase at home earlier this year. *Shudder*

Maybe I’ll just sleep on the couch tonight.